Puppy love
It must have been six- or seventeen years ago when I first met her. So far, my relations didn't go very well. There was that first kiss in kindergarten from QBASIC, where we made a text-based game with its famous PRINT commands. But I cheated on her, by tweaking the "Lingo" game timer from 7 to 70 seconds. That must have been the last time we spoke.
When I got a little bit older, I tried to date C++. That didn't work out too well either. She was the type of girl that comes with a thick manual. Always complaining about her syntax, nagging about linker errors, undeclared kisses. Impatient teenagers as we were. It was fun as long as it lasted. Or actually, it wasn't fun at all. In short, I couldn't read English books, nor did I speak C.
I always wanted to become a "programmer" (couldn't even spell it back then). Which is somewhat strange in itself, as I'm more an Alpha than a Beta. Numbers, Math, physics, chemistry... not really my cup of tea. I wasn't too bad at it, but my chemistry was more with, erh, hmm, "making stuff". And then I mean in a creative way, because my hands aren't even capable of holding a hammer. Drawing things, making up fantasy worlds, that kind of stuff. I didn't become a programmer because I liked brain-crackers or solving problems with logic. I figured in order to make (design) games, you had be able to program them. Well, if it takes writing zeros and ones on a computer, then so be it. Whatever it takes to realize my fantasies.
In that context, the first QBasic or C++ dates were a bummer. Nope. There are no ready-to-go "draw cool game figure" or "play shotgun sound effect" instructions. Browsing through the books I lend from the library, it seemed the highest possible accomplishment was a DOS console application that queried the user whether he was an asshole or not, using ScanF commands. Thanks, but no. As a teenager, I have more important things to do than studying books for just that. Like... drinking beer. Or playing games instead of trying to make them.
Dad received QBasic and a big bunch of programs + other course material... on cassette tape! No idea how the hell he did it (I must have been 11 or so) but somehow he managed to stream the tapes onto our 286 computer.
Going to college
But there she was. In 1998 we went to "Hogeschool Brabant" (now Avans in Breda I believe), just to have a look and get an idea of possible follow-up studies. Fortunately, for my age I was still kind of confident about the (game)"programming" thing, so I took a look at the computer studies section that day (though architecture also seemed fun and almost pulled me out).
She smiled at me, behind the glass computer screen. With the help of a step-by-step paper, we were to make a slide-puzzle program. From what I remembered then, QBasic looked like a blue pig. C++ looked as if she was always on her period; sulky, full of warning messages. But here was Delphi -3, I think, forgot to ask her number. She looked like an angel. Or no, like that Greek mythological bitch... oh yeah, Delphi or something. What made her so pretty, was the lack of a smack-in-your-face code editor, and a kiss-on-your-cheek IDE. A what? Integrated-Development-Environment silly. Instead of reading a fucking book in order to make a "how old are you? Press any number" DOS console program with dozens of lines, I just dragged & dropped buttons on a canvas. I never forgot the term "Property Inspector" since then, as it would allow me to edit colours, sizes, positions, captions, and all kinds of cool things. Without coding a single letter! Exactly what a not-so-Beta guy like me wants.
In the meanwhile, other kids from my class were complaining about how boring it was to follow shit step by step from a paper. But I was in trance. This program would be my portal to making games. Just drag & drop a sprite on the form-canvas! Of course, after some steps we had to double-click a button, and suddenly I was inside her. In her code-editor I mean. But, still being high in the air, I made my decision: I would marry that girl.
Just say yes And so it happened. My father bought her for three goats, and not much later she got pregnant from "project1.exe", a revolutionary image viewer program. About 60 other kids got born. Or well, most were prematurely aborted really. But to name a few of our bastards:
- "Shooting Galleria" - Shooting (clicking) animated TImage guys with gun sounds & blood effects!
- "Tank" - Moving a Tank image in 4 directions, blasting stuff
- "Boutman" - A bomberman based game. With poop and farts instead of bombs. Of course. "Poppe & Peppie racer" - A top view racing game with lots of crashes. And you could fire missiles and explode monkeys on the jungle race-track!
- "Boutman 3D" - Yes, in 3D. Including enemy AI such chasing toilets that bite, and turd-mine-layer-robots
- "Vietnam" - A ambitious RTS game. That was never finished.
It's a shame we never took pictures of our children. And erased hard-drives. Yes, we had rough times, but we loved each other no matter what. Going to that same "Hogeschool Brabant" later on, I was tempted by others. A bit of C/C++ again at collegue. And Java, what a ho. The entire school had her. But I wasn't too charmed by her slutty "console.output.write( string.stringFactory.makerClass('Screw you world.') )" way of saying things. Oh, and there was Clean. A "Functional programming language" like Haskell. What a nerd. Functional my ass, I couldn't even write the "How old are you?" console application with it. No, despite the temptations, Delphi and I trusted each other.
The truly old (2D game) shots are gone mostly, but I did found this. Back then you could get pretty good results with Milkshape models and lack of photo-realistic shaders.
What made her so special, besides her awesome IDE front, was her easy going slang (Turbo Pascal). Not that cryptic and far more forgiving than C/C++. And unlike Java or the likes that come with dozens of rules, methods, and restrictions, Delphi gave me some much needed freedom. Do as you like, she would say to me. I could use pointers if I pleased, and we didn’t rely on virtual-machines or runtime packages. The best of both worlds; flexible and advanced as C++, yet easy and flirty as Java.
Midlife crisis
Later on we started making a living together. Besides making half-finished game babies for fun, we now would make money by developing business software. Database programs, weighing applications, document generators, you name it. My heart was still with games, but face it; chances are small you’ll make a living out of it. Having my responsibilities as an adult man now, I had to earn a buck to support our family. Fortunately, Delphi always stood on my side. Alpha or not, I got pretty good at programming, knowing her thoroughly.
Our most ambitious venture so far must have been a 3D game engine, which resulted in Tower22. Together with a few business program, our real children. Some of them already flew out and left home. Tower22 is a raging ADHD teenager that requires lots of attention though. And frankly, I’m a bit tired of it.
Not of Tower22, don’t get me wrong. But of Delphi 7’s attitude. Often tired, not keeping up, wearing old fashioned grandma clothes. Maybe it’s not fair, but I feel she is just not cooperating anymore. We lost that spark. And I would be lying if I’d say I didn’t flirt with others at the office. Visual Basic .NET for example thought me Kama Sutra with better debugging options, and always up-to-date support for 21th century technology. And Qt convinced me that C++ didn’t have to be dull and impossible.
So I swallowed some pride and sentiments, and started dating a smoking hot new chick; her younger sister! Delphi XE 3. Delphi7 doesn’t know yet, she still washes my socks and cooks supper. But honestly… I already packed some of Tower22’s Teddy bears and Pajama’s, as we secretly move over at Delphi XE’s house during the weekends. “Business trip for work”, I would say to D7. But who am I kidding?
A D7 shot of the T22 Map editor. And with "Classic Style" code editor coloring of course. Didn't completely forget about QBasic! My friends would *always* see this blue screen whenever they entered my room.
A better future?
Finding a better home for our son Tower22 isn’t easy. Obviously he will miss the warmth and security Delphi7 gave all these years. I thought about moving over to C++, but that would be too much of a shell-shock. Having to re-program the whole kid… no. Let’s give the Delphi family another chance.
So I copied the entire Tower22 folder and made new XE project. You can clearly see this little girl caught up with the present. Kids these days… Just take a look at the IDE for example. I’m entering a Space Shuttle cabin with all those new panels and buttons (but less space for the heart; the code editor). Plasma Thrusters engaged Spock. Another exciting feature for me –working a lot with vector math- are record functions and operator overloading.
Yet it’s funny I’m still seeing quirks and characteristics of her older sister. Or well, funny… more like encountering some of the old shortcomings again. Having to include each and every unit again and again (instead of automatically including child-units of a top-level unit like C does). Namespaces were introduced, but now “import all” like Java can do with “import OpenGL.*”? Or how about the somewhat wacky not very helpful auto-code-completion? Qt does a better job. Oh well. It must be in the family DNA. Or maybe I’m just not experienced enough yet.
Unicode tears
Our first big argue was/is about UniCode strings though. Of course, before just dumping my beloved Delphi7, I did some research on the internet. Googling Delphi XE, hacking her Facebook, watching her on Tinder… For the sake of Tower22’s health, I was concerned about how much effort a code migration would be. “No problem!” “Just do it!” was the bottom line. Ok, ok, if you say so…
And, how did it go? Any problems? Let me try to describe… It felt as if eating logs and going to the bathroom. As if fighting with a swarm of penguins barehanded. As if an elephant baby crawled back into me, had to give it rebirth, and it came back without a nose. And three ears.
No, it didn’t go without a struggle, Delphi XE crying, and me yelling at her. And shoot, we’re still not finished! She keeps saying AnsiString is so 2000 and one, I keep saying everything was better with AnsiStrings back then. I’ll admit, hanging around with Delphi7 for so long may have affected my judgement. Don’t forget, I’m an old pervert dating this young cheetah. I know computers have more memory, and AnsiStrings - having 1 byte per character only – have a limited set of characters. But… do I really need Chinese characters for twice the price?
She would defend by saying Delphi still does support ansiStrings, if I really want to. “Just typecast them old nagger”. Just typecast… just typecast, clearly you have no idea what you’re talking about, woman! You never grew up with limited memory, old DLL’s and binary files, spoiled brat!
Baby? Ah no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to - please baby, now don’t cry. You’re not ugly. But please, you have to understand that:
• Tower22 uses many different binary files
• Tower22 uses many (self-coded and not self-coded) DLL’s
• Tower22 used –and forgive me if that was a mistake- “String[somelength]” types.
• There is no proper equivalent! “AnsiString[32]” won’t work.
• You can typecast all you want internally, but ping-ponging UniCode strings towards a DLL that expects AnsiStrings or arrays of Ansi chars just doesn’t work! (and vice-versa).
• Struct or type sizes when involving the Delphi standard “strings” will give a different size than it did in Delphi7
• This will give invalid reads or writes when dealing with binary files.
• The compiler does not throw an error when forgetting to (properly) typecast from one to another.
• The whole game + tools and DLL’s is about 400.000 lines of code. Good luck finding the issues.
I ended up with making -as if we were making an old C program without any string library- a bunch of string conversion functions and tried to locate where they would be needed through the entire code. Not saying that I’m inclined to keep using ansiStrings, but the first goal of migration is to make things working again. First a solid basis, then we can chat about replacing old types and methods for newer ones.
Group-sex
All in all, I feel bad for 7, but in the age of 64-bits, more and more non-Windows platforms, and moreover the guarantee of not falling too far behind, I think we made a healthy choice. It sucks that Tower22 crashed during loading now, but give me a few days and it will work again. I hope. On the bright side, it forces me to have a clean-sweep. One plus about having to scan the whole code for those stupid Ansi/UniCode clashes, are the visits to older parts. It’s like cleaning the house; you’ll find all kinds of crazy things, long-lost items and other fond memories.
One major advantage of Delphi XE is the Project Group feature. Modern programming environments usually support multiple projects, so you can swiftly jump between projects, and debug all your way through. Delphi 7 didn’t allow to open multiple projects (though you could jump into a linked DLL while stepping), but XE fortunately does. It may not sound like a very big deal, but to me it actually is. Doing this upgrade isn’t only about just updating for the sake of updating. Not only do I want to clean out old garbage code. I want the re-structure the engine in more logical parts / modules.
And yes, that involves a lot of rewriting, but once I’m on the motherf*cker, I’ll go warp-speed. You see, typing code isn’t the major time consumer. Googling how-to-code, reading papers about graphics, trial & error, and fixing mistakes (in shitty code) is what really sucks up time like a black hole. Remember that many of the T22 code was written while learning. Never did shaders. Never did FMOD or Newton physics. Never really thought about flexible entity systems, or multi-threading. For a “first version”, it’s actually quite amazing that it works pretty well. But if I had to re-do it, I would definitely do it a whole lot better. Smarter. And that’s what I’m about to do.
First of all, I will do it slowly, step by step. At all times, the game must remain “working”. For example, one of the first (and simplest) moves is to separate the whole common types and math portion. I made a separate module that holds all the Vector, Matrix, String and other types, plus all of their functions. Dot products, Matrix multiplications, string help functions, and so on. Once up and running, I’ll remove the old functions and types from the “old code”. The same will happen for drawing (OpenGL) functions, Cg, and so on.
I’m not 100% confident of how to modularize though, but maybe some Delphi readers here can give directions. Initially I thought about making a DLL for each module. Thus for example, a “Utiltities” module for all the basic types and common (math) functions mentioned above. The nice thing about DLL’s is that you can reuse them, in another environment. For example, you could attach them to your Visual Basic or C++ program. But three major disadvantages are:
• Slight overhead for calling another module (note that math or draw calls happen a lot!)
• Not sure if I can export OOP (classes, records with functions, et cetera). AFAIK, DLL’s can only export functions, simple types, or Interfaces. Could be wrong though.
• Harder to debug when dealing with shared memory / released pointers, et cetera
A more logical move would be static libraries. You include a library, and it gets baked into your project as if it was just a part of one and the same project. Now here is where my knowledge gets flaky. I believe C has *.A or *.LIB libraries for that. But what is the Delphi equivalent? I guess it is “BPL Packages”, which can either be “design time” (static), or linked at runtime, like DLL’s.
Currently I experimented by making this “Utilities” library as a separate package project. Then the other host project (“the game”) would simply include its units. It works, but I feel somehow that I’m doing it as it should be. For one thing, can’t I just install that package instead of having to add a search path to all of its units?
Well, details. The most important part is that the code will get a reboot – hopefully without bringing the game “offline” too often- resulting in better, cleaned, more compact, and more logical code. And also, having more & smaller modules, a better ability to let other Delphi people help me on certain modules. Would Delphi XE be a better choice than staying with Delphi 7, or moving over to C++? Impossible to tell, and maybe it doesn’t really matter anyway. What matters is a working product in the end. But so is keeping up with the technology, instead of sticking in your old dusty comfort zone.
